


The Third Incurable Affliction

by yuletide_archivist



Category: MASH (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-03-14
Updated: 2004-03-14
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:56:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1640090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not-quite-slash: BJ has to adapt to Korea, in more ways than one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Third Incurable Affliction

**Author's Note:**

> Written for alestar

 

 

Thanks to Minttown1, Raven, and Meredith S. for their stellar betas, and to Meredith Bronwen Mallory for poking me about this till I finished.

And, of course, happy very late New Year's to alestar!

_Doctor, my eyes--_  
tell me what you see.  
I hear their cries.  
Just say if it's too late for me.  
\--"Doctor, My Eyes," Jackson Browne

Later, after months in camp, it would occur to BJ that in twenty-eight years of life, he had never realized that pain could be as purblind and immediate as breathing. Pain itself had never been strange. His father taught him at age eleven how to hold a scalpel, and when the sheer bright slipped and opened wide the skin of his thumb, his mother railed at his father for this inattentiveness. During his residency, patients daily offered up their agony that he might take it away. Still, later, he would understand that for twenty-eight years, he had known pain solely as the abstract, arcane conversing of nerves, and when in the darkness he came to know it tangibly, he was surprised. He was surprised, without science or reason.

But that would come later.

BJ hunched over an unfamiliar table, blinking against the light. After eight hours in surgery, the world seemed to have slipped off its axis. He moved mechanically, following a shell fragment. His mind, unoccupied, went ranging down the labyrinthine paths of memory. First there was Peg and her rigid terror when they last embraced; then the kaleidoscopic whirl of his arrival in Kimpo, rickshaws rattling and dust rising; and then, inevitably, a form standing alone by the road, rearing up in the glassy shimmer of sun. There was no comparison for what he felt when first he met this man, this Doctor Pierce, when first he knew the self-conscious flash of that smile -- no comparison except for this, he reflected dully, as he watched his scalpel widen the hole, this shockingly sterile motion of separation.

The fragment eluded him. He had felt it briefly between the two gloved fingers of his left hand, but now it had burrowed close to the heart. Perilously close. The world tilted a little farther, and he stood, plastered with blood, watching his hands begin to tremble.

The nurse must have spoken, because Dr. Pierce coalesced in front of him -- as if rising again from the vitreous heat of that road in Kimpo, Venus in a sea of red -- and said, "Is there a problem?"

BJ didn't even attempt to speak, but merely stared at him. Pierce sighed and reached for the instrument tray.

"I'll take over."

As BJ relinquished his position, he realized that he should explain, and he said, "It's not--"

"Hunnicutt," said Pierce curtly, "there are kids lined up outside literally dying for this table. Just watch, huh?"

BJ did as he was told, writhing internally with shame, but respectful in spite of himself. Pierce worked swiftly, with a concentration that rendered him near sightless, flooded with instinct. BJ felt not a little envy at the asymptotic movement of his forceps, barely skirting the heart. Soon the fragment was out, winking in the light, clattering into the basin, and Pierce glanced up to give perfunctory instructions.

"All right, you close." Then, as if he couldn't quite restrain himself: "He's _your_ patient."

BJ's stitching job was no more than adequate, and he knew it. As Pierce moved off, BJ could only lower his head, flushing, thinking suddenly of the way that Pierce had touched him that afternoon on the way to the showers, arm around his shoulder like a brother. Reaching further, he knew again the private weight of Pierce's hand at the base of his skull while he retched, and the shock of Pierce's eyes. There was something grown flat and frozen in those eyes, something he could not fathom, as he could not fathom this plunge from empathy to antagonism, except--

Except as he caught Pierce's glance across the table, he thought he recognized in it fear; fear and the ponderous, glacial slide of ice in thaw.

* * *

After his first O.R. session, BJ wandered dazedly across the compound to the officers' club. He wasn't a drinker, not really (no more than a glass of wine with Peg every now and again), but he ordered a shot of gin at the bar as if by reflex.

He saw Pierce almost as soon as he arrived. The man was incomprehensible: not an hour before he had been self-absorbed and aloof, but now he leered amiably at off-duty nurses. BJ mused that this might be attributed to the little row of empty glasses sitting on the counter. In any case, he wavered between scorn and awe for this person who laughed too loudly, spoke too soon, knew everyone, and was touched by no one. Pierce came from nowhere -- "Androscoggin College, home of pretty girls and the men who operate on them," he had boasted in the jeep -- and yet BJ, who had graduated top of his class at Stanford and assiduously read every major medical journal, could in no way compete with that unfettered skill.

They avoided each other's eyes for a long while, but the night was longer. In time, Pierce sidled up to the bar, and though BJ was aware of the advance, he flinched lightly when a hand dropped onto his shoulder. Pierce, predicting the flinch, gripped him all the tighter.

"I just wanted to apologize about that thing in the O.R."

"No, it was--" began BJ.

"I wanted to apologize for being so highhanded about it." Pierce paused, gave a tight smile. "Not for taking over in the first place. You've gotta be quick in there."

"My fault," said BJ. "I'm not sure I can fill the empty shoes around here."

Pierce shot him a look and turned abruptly away. The glass in his hand rattled, and he set it down hard on the counter and called, "Another gin." The bartender topped it up again, and thus fortified, Pierce grinned humorlessly. "I'll need to be a lot drunker before we can start that talk about filling shoes. I'm always up for taking off shoes, socks, and upward from there, but filling them? I'd like to be at the signpost that says 'Last stop before unconsciousness.'"

BJ toyed with his own glass. It seemed oddly obscene to hear this from Pierce, Pierce with his wide eyes and prescient touch. BJ clenched his jaw and forced his mind to Peg, distinct from the miasma of this place, the cloying fragrance of business girls and that whiff of Pierce, all gin and pain and lust. God, lust; BJ hardly knew what it meant.

Silence again settled like a spore between them. The club patrons began to disperse to their tents, and BJ waited to feel in his throat the clench of disapproval at the unmarried pairs. He waited for some time.

When the room stood empty but for the two of them, BJ said desperately, "You're a very good surgeon."

Pierce chuckled wryly and ducked his head. "Nah, that's just a vicious rumor." He rapped on the counter. "More gin."

"The bartender's closing up. And I think you're already drunk," ventured BJ. He might have overlooked the fact were it not for the telltale roughness in Pierce's voice. He couldn't keep the disappointment out of his own.

Pierce clambered off his stool with great dignity. "Well, I _know_ I'm already drunk," he replied, and fell into the bar. BJ slipped off his seat to catch him -- a strange reversal of roles, his cleaning up someone else's mess, but he couldn't resent it when Pierce clung to his arm, shaking. He thought at first that Pierce would be sick (his prerogative, surely, after witnessing BJ's breakdown on the drive into camp), but he shook only with surprise at the contact. As BJ maneuvered them both out the door, he inexplicably recalled that boy on the O.R. table, the thin alien shard making its clandestine approach to the heart. Under his arm, there was a vague stirring from Pierce.

From Hawkeye.

He halted in the compound, disoriented. "Home, Jeeves," murmured Hawkeye from far away, and BJ would have liked nothing better, nothing better in the world than to leave this sourceless voice of irony.

"You couldn't afford the plane fare," he said, half to himself.

Then Hawkeye was holding him, too, supporting him. "The Swamp's to your right," he said, and more quietly added, "Sorry to say that soon it'll feel right, too."

They found their way together. Inside the Swamp, Hawkeye collapsed over his bed without so much as removing his boots.

"I think I was going to apologize, back in the officers' club," he said into the pillow. "Did I do that?"

"Yes." BJ waited warily. Hawkeye said nothing more, and so BJ began to change out of his clothes. The night air hung warm in the room, but in the split second that he leaned over to retrieve his bathrobe, he shivered, his bare back exposed. It was the deep, visceral chill of being observed, but that was ridiculous -- Hawkeye remained face-down on the bed, the camp had folded in on itself for the night, and BJ was as alone as he had been since Kimpo, that frantic dream of dust.

Continuing the conversation, Hawkeye said unexpectedly, "'Cause what you did in the O.R. today wasn't so bad."

"No?" asked BJ neutrally, tying the robe around his waist.

"No. It was almost... endearing." Hawkeye could not see BJ's puzzled frown, but he understood it nonetheless. "At least all of this still bothers you." He laughed shortly. "It's concussive, isn't it? They set you down in the middle of Korea, wherever the hell that is, and it's like a concussion."

BJ stood beside his bed, ill at ease. "I guess they thought I was ready after five weeks of indoctrination." His own grim humor startled and frightened him.

"Like a sound concussion," Hawkeye continued clinically, as if sarcasm from someone other than himself did not register, "ringing in the ears, pounding in the head, vision falling away. 'Doctor, heal thyself,'" he intoned. "The funny part is that once you do, you realize you wish you'd kept the injury. At least you can feel that." There was a moment of stillness, into which Pierce's voice crept again: "Speaking of pounding heads, do you mind turning off the light?"

Numbness settled around BJ's heart, so that he could not trace the path of that deadly sliver, hurtling home.

Home, which was, as the saying went, where the heart was, hanging suspended like a pendulum in the hollowness of his chest. He thought again of Peg, how the light layered years upon her and revealed her for what she was, a woman shrinking from age and keeping house so her husband would have somewhere to return. He thought of his father, years ago, who came in late and slept on the couch, sometimes smelling of antiseptic, sometimes of perfume. Jay Hunnicutt's lesson was that of life's first pain, the fine slice of the razor, but also of less concrete knowledge: often he brought his son to the hospital and took him along on rounds. One summer night when the heat prickled like a premonition on the back of BJ's neck, they checked on a man whose sight had been burned away in a house fire, and Jay Hunnicutt had shaken his head and said that blindness was one thing you couldn't fix. In six months he would teach that there were other such things, would divorce BJ's mother and disappear, but BJ never quite understood that particular lesson.

Two decades later, BJ still would admit to only two incurable conditions, blindness and death. The darkness that descended as the lamp went out represented a little of both. Without light, BJ located the courage to move into his own bed. Blindness lent them anonymity, Hawkeye with his face buried in the pillow and BJ with his eyes open and fixed: nameless and shapeless and hopeless, in the dim places of Korea.

In the shadowed Swamp, the silent invader slipped up inexorably through the muscles of BJ's chest, and perhaps he recognized it then, that third incurable affliction, that creeping infiltration of the immune system for which there was no antibody. Perhaps he would even admit it--

But that would come later.

BJ lay waiting for the tent to resolve itself into forms as faint as a synapse's memory of pain: the razor on his finger, the cries from the wounded, the failure of fatherhood (is the son's, is the son's, is the son's....) He lay in the crack between dark and dawn, and he listened as Hawkeye's sleeping breath, clean as a scalpel, severed him from all that he had known in twenty-eight years of life.

 


End file.
